


By the Horns

by kitsunealyc



Category: Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-03
Updated: 2016-07-03
Packaged: 2018-07-19 22:24:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,214
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7379824
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kitsunealyc/pseuds/kitsunealyc
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dorian struggles with the eternal puzzle: What to get the man who lost everything.</p>
            </blockquote>





	By the Horns

**Author's Note:**

  * For [20thcenturyvole](https://archiveofourown.org/users/20thcenturyvole/gifts).



“Vishante kaffas, I filled out your damned form. What more do you want?” Dorian curled his heated fingers tight around his staff, using the enchanted wood haft as a heat sink for his growing ire. Few things these days could arouse him to the point of losing control of his magic—threats to the few people he called friend in this word, his father’s condescending judgement, and it would seem, petty and needless bureaucracy.

Ser Morris tapped several blank lines on the parchment Dorian had filled out with less-than-painstaking care. “Not in its entirety. All requisitions need an estimation of cost, an evaluation of relative necessity, and a statement of purpose.”

Dorian snatched up the quartermaster’s quill. “Why did we get saddled with you?” he muttered. “Where’s the other one. She never wasted my time with paperwork.”

In fact, Quartermaster Threnn had taken quite a liking to Dorian in the few weeks he’d been at Haven. Dorian wasn’t Orlesian, and he had no particular opinions for or against Teyrn Loghain. He’d quite enjoyed winding Threnn up and supporting her against Loghain’s detractors, of which there had been many.

Dorian was paying the price of that petty diversion now. Threnn had been relieved of her post, and Dorian was left dealing with her successor. A successor who had apparently been chosen only for his connections, and who’d learned how to be a quartermaster from books. He was insistent on sticking to them.

Doran dragged the form across the desk. “What pointless information did you need for this equally pointless exercise?”

“Cost estimate, necessity level, and purpose.” The man cheerfully pointed out the bare lines again. Heat returned to Dorian’s extremities. What was the point of being rude when the person you were rude to remained so damnably affable?

Ignoring the stench of singed feathers, Dorian spoke as he wrote. “I don’t have the faintest clue how much this horn balm stuff would cost. All my needs are dire or I wouldn’t be wasting my time with this nonsense, and in this case, the purpose is for a gift, which makes them doubly dire.”

Ser Morris paused in the act of taking back the form. “A gift? Oh, in that case, you need to fill out schedule 2c and have an affidavit signed by Bonny Sims of the Tradesmen Guild that the item isn’t carried by one of their members, nor can it be acquired.” He smiled genially through the recitation.

The parchment began to smolder where Doran’s fingers rested on it.

“Did you know,” he began, just as genially as the quartermaster, “that, despite persisting for several thousand years, the Imperium is remarkably free from this sort of bureaucratic nonsense? Do you know why?”

“Can’t say as I do, ser, but I don’t see as how anyone got hurt from a bit of organization.”

“Can’t you? Allow me to enlighten you. It’s because we have a ruling class who can immolate petty bureaucrats to ash if they get too annoying. Keeps us remarkably free of this sort of hassle. Tell me, is there a form for approving that?” Dorian lifted his requisition form. A tendril of smoke curled up between them. And then, very deliberately to emphasize the point, he released just enough magic to immolate the requisition form in a flash of white heat.

“I rather suspect not. I withdraw my request,” Dorian said, wiping ash on the front of Ser Morris’s jerkin. “I will find some other way to acquire the item in question.”

Satisfied by the smile frozen in place on Ser Morris’s lips, Dorian tipped his staff and exited the supply office.

Hi anger followed him all of two steps into Skyhold’s upper courtyard before the cold and the sunlight—and Dorian’s own appreciation of the absurd—chased it away. He rubbed his brow, chuckling. All that nonsense, all this effort—he’d left his cozy library nook, come out into the cold, lost his temper—all for a gift he wasn’t entirely certain he wanted to give.

Usually, if Doran needed something—the latest fashions, a proper grooming kit for his mustache, radiance powder for his skin, a bit of hair tint that one time he thought he’d spotted a distressing bit of grey (that had turned out to be ash, thank the Maker)—he could get it from one of his contacts in Tevinter. He was still an Altus, after all. Still a _Pavus_. Father couldn’t take that from him. He still knew people, and they still wanted things from him. Those who didn’t think his current flaunting of paternal will was a phase Dorian would get over, they looked to his position with the Inquisition and saw other potential benefits to currying future favors.

But fashion was one thing. Acceptable. Expected, even. This... this was not something he could ever request from a fellow Tevinter. Even Maevaris would arch one perfectly drawn brow if such a request came her way.

There would be questions. There would be... conclusions.

Perhaps Ser Morris’s forms were the Maker’s blessing in disguise, saving Dorian from compounding one drunken mistake with a second, disastrously sober one.

He crossed the upper courtyard, determined to let this foolishness of his lie dying, when a shout stopped him.

“Hey! Dorian! You come out to help us spar?” Bull had a shout meant to carry above the sounds of battle. In the relative quiet of the courtyard, it echoed off the stone walls and startled the sparrows from the search for seedlings in the sparse winter grass. There was no way that Dorian could pretend not to have heard it.

No way The Bull would _let_ him, drat the man. “Or did you just come to _watch_?”

It was typical Bull, the rumbled words weighted with friendly innuendo. Nobody observing would have any reason to guess there might be more meaning to the entendre beyond the usual double.

And yet, even knowing that, Dorian turned, flustered, and snapped, “Yes, because that’s just how I prefer to spend my waking hours: Watching you mow down a line of men like a great, sweaty... flexing...” Dorian searched for the words to salvage a retort that had quickly gone awry.

Bull didn’t help. He left his line of sweaty, wilting Chargers and strode to the edge of the pitch with a spring in his step, as though he hadn’t been working them half the morning. Planting the head of his great axe before him, he leaned his weight on the haft. Flexing. It was all... terribly... distracting.

“Go on,” he drawled.

Dorian ignored the jolt of heat blossoming up his spine at the provocation. “Fasta vass, I didn’t mean it like _that_ , you great lummox.”

“Ah, so you _do_ want a piece of the action.”

Dorian made the mistake of glancing down at the Bull’s thick fingers wrapped around the haft of his axe. Also flexing. More heat flooding Dorian, with nowhere safe to shunt it. Years of training kicked in. He drew on ice—never his specialty, but useful in a pinch—and used it to counter the heat. His voice, when he spoke, was once more under control. “I doubt you could handle me when I’m operating at my _full_ capacity.”

Two could play at this double entendre game.

Several of the Chargers had gathered when it seemed their boss was taking a break from beating the piss out of them. They hoo’ed and nudged each other, grinning to a one.

“Hey, Chief,” Krem called above the general murmur. “Weren’t you saying the other day how you’ve given it to a bunch of ‘Vints, but never really taken it from one?”

Bull growled and shouldered his axe, glaring back at his lieutenant. “I think what I said was that I’ve been able to take anything a ‘Vint tried to dish.”

Imperium pride—and the heat that needed some sort of outlet—made Dorian reckless. He stepped up to Bull, close enough to feel the heat coming off the Qunari _._ “Do you think you could take me?” he asked softly, a threat wrapped in velvet tones.

Bull looked down at him. Grinned, slow and sure. “Thought I already had. Three times.” It was low enough that _maybe_ the Chargers hadn’t heard.

Dorian found he didn’t care half so much as he cared about beating that smug look off the damned Qunari’s scarred face. “Fifty paces,” he said.

“What?”

“That’s all I need. Fifty paces, and those words will be smoke in your nose and ash on your tongue.” The standard challenge lacked the poetry it would have had in Tevene, but the meaning was clear enough.

And Bull grinned as though he hadn’t spent years working for the Ben-Hassrath and didn’t know exactly how dangerous this could be if either of them wished it. “Done.”

Krem knew. “Er... Chief...?”

“Quiet. Pay attention, boys. You might learn something.” Bull paced off the distance. His paces, not Dorian’s, which was a fairness that Dorian hadn’t expected.  
  
Hadn’t, but probably should have. The Iron Bull was nothing he’d been led to believe Qunari were. And that... was the problem. For both of them, really.

“Ready?” Bull called from across the courtyard, sending up another spray of startled sparrows.

Dorian quelled his confusion. He planted himself, planted his staff, and let the heat flood through him. “Ready.”

Roaring, The Iron Bull charged. A sliver of ice fear pierced up through the heat of Dorian’s power and just as quickly melted under the weight of that power. Dorian channeled that heat with precision. The Bull’s foot came down on a patch of bare ground, and the ground exploded into flame and smoke.

“Hah!” Bull jumped, rolled, came up just as hard and fast. More ground exploded where his footsteps fell, until he changed his direct charge into a series of hopscotching leaps, leaving a wake of smoking potholes behind him.

Dorian sent up a wall of flame. Bull leapt through it—his mistake, as it left him blinded by the brightness and unable to dodge the—albeit _restrained_ —bolts of flame that Dorian hurled his way.

Apparently relying on the wind of his passing to cool the residual flames, the Bull continued to come directly at Dorian. Dorian fought the urge to take a step back, to forfeit the challenge. Perhaps fifty paces hadn’t been enough. Perhaps Dorian shouldn’t have been holding back. Perhaps the Bull wouldn’t hold back.

Dorian braced himself for impact, and the possibility of, if not death, at the very least a great deal of pain.

Bull’s axe head stopped just short of Dorian’s neck. And then moved an inch, cold metal kissing blood-heated skin. “Boom. You don’t have a head,” Bull said, grinning down at Dorian far too smugly.

Dorian nudged the head of his staff deeper into Bull’s hard abdomen just above that hideous girdle of his, letting a curling tendril of the power he had left warm the skin there. “And boom,” he said, just as softly. Just as smugly. “You don’t have a middle.”

Bull looked down, leaned his weight in so that Dorian’s staff pressed harder into his belly. “Mutually assured satisfaction?”

Impossible man. “I think the word you’re looking for is destruction.”

“Am I? Right. Must be the heat getting to me.” Bull shook his head. His horns were smoking. “Rattles the brains.”

“It’s freezing out here.”

“Is it.”

Dorian swallowed, unable to think of a retort, clever or otherwise. Fasta vass, he was doomed.

Bull relented, taking a step back, two, and shouldering his axe. “Alright Chargers! Enough slacking about! I want a ravine formation behind the tavern in five. We’re going to practice dodging fire spurts in a constricted environment.” Bull’s smile at the subsequent groans contained more than a hint of playful malice. He smacked one of the dawdling Chargers on the rear to keep him moving.

When they were a retreating crowd of good-natured grumbling, Bull turned that grin on Dorian. “Good fight. Ten more, and you might have had me.”

“And that makes you smile?” Dorian asked. The fight might have been a draw, but still he’d been defeated in the arena that really mattered.

“Good to be reminded of my limits. Lets me push them. Next time, you should make it a hundred paces.” The Bull’s jocularity softened. As did his voice. “You coming by the tavern later?”

Dorian wanted to. He very badly wanted to. Which was exactly why he shouldn’t. The smile he pasted on his lips was brittle as ice. Vivienne would have been very proud of it. “Terribly sorry to deprive you of my vastly superior company, but some of us don’t have the time to spend drinking and carousing every night.”

Bull tilted his head so that Dorian couldn’t duck away from the gleam of his good eye. “Riiight. Well, you know my door’s open if you need it.”

Yes. Dorian knew. Had known. Had gone through that unlocked door once already, under the influence of too much Ferelden ale. But there was a world of difference between a drunken tumble and _choosing_ this. “I have to go.”

He stalked back the way he’d come, back to the quartermaster. He was going to need another requisition form. And a signed affidavit. And schedule 2c.

 


End file.
